With regards to time travel and washing machines, my first thought was this: “We need more Calgon!”

Not to mention the “Calgon, take me away!” commercials which didn’t involve
Asian stereotypes playing fake stereotypes, but rather a naked white woman ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVf1lClfBng) in a tub if my young impressionable male mind recalls that correctly. It was the Viagra commercial of my youth. (I averted my eyes)

Ryan a little off topic but my eyes were drawn to the parent’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” album. Really captivated the attention of me and my buddies. Can’t say that I recall ever listening to the album, but we really enjoyed the cover.

If I had the chance to travel back in time, I would hasten to encourage the Nisenan people to designate their lands as historic, and protected by laws. These laws would forbid the removal of oak trees, the disturbance of waterways, the washing away of mountains and would also require all dwellings to be indigenous in form and function. That way, centuries of living harmoniously with this ecosystem might have continued and this place might still be a garden. The Nisenan were the ultimate “slow growth” society, but progress came to the foothills instead.

A gentle reading of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” would direct you to a more enlightened understanding of the concept of winners and losers in human society going forward. So even within your antiquated understanding of the term “losers,” the answer is yes, “losers” do indeed “get to put such legal strictures on lands that they lost.”